No Reason

As you might have guessed from my silence, I'm having a little bit of a rough time right about now. I don't even know for sure if that's the correct way to characterize it; it might not be a bad thing, but it surely FEELS bad. It's like...It's like the mud at the bottom of the lake is shifting, big slabs of ooze rearranging themselves, rising and falling and moving around. And in the long run, it will probably be a good thing for the lake--but in the short-term it feels scary and murky and dangerous. I feel like I'm figuring things out, a little--and one of the things I'm figuring out is exactly how little I've figured out.

One of the actual, concrete things I've learned lately, though, is this: I have absolutely no tolerance for my own faults and failings. I mean, NONE. I don't even have a reference point to frame them from. I read or hear people talking about "accepting yourself the way you are" and my immediate internal response is, and I quote, "???" I have no idea on how that might be accomplished. In my mind, if you have a fault, that's something wrong, and if something's wrong, you FIX it. You don't "accept" it or "tolerate" it or "live with" it--you root it out and crush it. And by "you", of course, I mean "me". Other people can do what they believe, and good for them--but if I know there's something wrong with me, I'm not going to be happy til it's fixed. And in my mind, there are so damn many things wrong with me. No wonder I feel overwhelmed all the time--I've got a to-do list that, if I held one end of it and dropped it out my fourth-story bedroom window, it would touch the ground, and that's not even counting laundry and the catbox.

And then there's work, which has been for the past two weeks an unsettling amount of crazy-go-nuts; supposedly the "busy season" isn't til midsummer, but I don't the faculty, staff, and students got that memo. And it's been honest-to-god actual WORK, not just goofiness where someone can't get to the internet because they didn't plug in their network cable, or their screen won't come on because the switch is OFF on the power strip their monitor's plugged into. We get plenty of those, of course, but for the past two weeks it's been serious work. And I love it. This is the first job that I've felt really COMFORTABLE in; even in my old-old-old job, the one I had for the first two years of this blog, I never felt like I fit in completely. Here, I do. I can't say I would choose to hang out with most of the people outside of work, but (with one or two exceptions) I don't actively dislike any of them either. And what's more, I know I do a good job, and more importantly I know my BOSSES know I do a good job. I'm not the most technically-apt person there, but I'm definitely the most willing to take on a task, or to help someone out. This past week, though, I've gotten home at the end of the day, and all I've wanted to do is just face-plant into the bed.

I don't know how people do it, though. I'm not deluded enough to believe that I'm the only person on earth who sees her own faults clearly; so how do people just accept themselves? I know I wouldn't date me (along with a litany of appearance-related issues, I sleep til odd hours, have horrible taste in television, and require way too much downtime); I'd think twice before inviting me to a party (I'm annoying and I apparently talk too loudly without realizing it, even though my hearing is fine--I think it's because I'm so used to people talking over me); basically, I'm one of those people who wears my dorky-ness on my sleeve. There are times even -I'm- embarrassed to be seen with me. But, see, here's the thing: all of that is when I look at how I would see myself if I was someone else. It's like, if there was no one else in the world, I would be okay with being exactly who I am and exactly how I am--but because there's this whole other world of people which I have to interact with, all the things I'm okay with about myself are transformed into flaws, which makes me even MORE uncomfortable than I would normally be. (Is this starting to sound perilously like the eternal complaint of the pompous and narcissistic--"Nobody gets me"? And that's another thing--one of the things I don't like about myself is that I'm self-absorbed. But if I'm not constantly picking myself apart, I'm worried that I'm being too easy on myself, being complacent...I worry sometimes that sometimes I'm not worrying enough.)

Yes, it does sound like I'm going a little bit crazy, doesn't it. I worry about that too, a little. Mostly, though, I think I'm on the verge of figuring something out; whatever it is, I hope it helps, and that it's nowhere near as scary as it feels.